Sheikh Musa was rather amusing about the Seligmans’ [husband and wife Harvard anthropologists] visit to the Kababish some years ago…Musa had stuffed them with a lot of nonsense as a joke. “I was only a boy, how should I remember accurately the customs of the Arabs?” Hmm! He had got over the habit of them sitting down and asking things like “What are your customs on the wedding night?” and other such intimate questions, and then pronto writing down the answers like a policeman in a notebook at the scene of an accident.
-April 28, 1931, Trek Journal, C.A.E. Lea, A.D.C. in Dar al-Kababish
I can only hope that the drovers did not later take it badly when I got them talking about their customs of the Shahr al-’Asl, Month of Honey, and we all had a big bawdy laugh, and then they saw me write it down in my diary. Or maybe that made them laugh even more.